Recently, Inside Mac Games had a chance to sit down with Zachary Black of ZSculpt Entertainment to discuss their upcoming threequel for the Dark Castle series, Return to Dark Castle.

IMG: How did you get involved in the Dark Castle projects?

Zachary Black: In mid 1997 I was living in Costa Rica, and had just completed Meteor Storm. I was looking for a new, challenging project to help get Z Sculpt off the ground. A few months earlier I had learned about Delta Tao's Color Dark Castle, which re-kindled my interest in one of my favorite games of all time. Literally, I came home one night and startedputting together a story line and programming a title screen. A few days later, I e-mailed it to Delta Tao and rest is history. Needless to say, I was thrilled!

IMG: What sorts of major changes have been made to the game's architecture?

ZB: Probably the biggest change comes in the level design. The original screens from the previous games were individually hand drawn. Although this approach made them very unique and memorable, it simply wasn't flexible. DC3 uses "piece sets" and a level editor, allowing us to create rooms ( and more importantly, change them ), in a fraction of the time. Don't be fooled though, there will be plenty of unique textures and objects to keep the rooms from getting repetetive. I'm trying to maintain the original "hand drawn" look of the game as much as possible.

IMG: What sorts of extra goodies can we expect in RtDC?

ZB: Lots! Some new enemies, weapons, loads of new levels, and many, many secrets...

IMG: How would you compare work on RtDC to some of your other projects?

ZB: HARD. I had no idea what I was getting into when I first proposed the idea of a DC sequel to Delta Tao. There were many aspects of 2D/platform gaming that were completely new to us, and our biggest setback was a lack of a scrolling level engine and editor.